TRASHFUTURE - The Ol’ Ball and Blockchain ft. Tom Walker

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

Comedian Tom Walker joins the gang to discuss how blockchain has finally disrupted dating! Then, we look at the demons pouring cryptocurrency poison into the ears of regulators in the US and U.K., a SoftBank insurance unicorn’s underwriting technology that isn’t, and we cap it off with a reading. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture Please consider donating to charities helping Palestinian people here: https://www.islamic-relief.org.uk/palestine-emergency-appeal/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI3oja5NbR8AIVSOmyCh2LdQ9rEAAYAiAAEgKM9PD_BwE and here: https://www.grassrootsalquds.net/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Today, anybody over 30 can get your vaccine, so get out there and get your vaccine. What's happening? What's happening? What's happening? Are you worried about Dominic coming and giving evidence today, Mr. Hancock? Hello and welcome to this episode of Hang On. Let me check it in my mental diary. Free episode, the free one.

It's the free one. There it is. Welcome to the free one. Like clockwork, they do the voice. Yeah. Oh, oh my God. So I was at a girl's place last night, who I met on Hinge, who was like, oh, I listened to your podcast.

And I'm like, oh no. And then she goes, yeah, you just spent like five minutes at the start going on about it being the free one and I stopped listening. Well, I suppose you're going to have to quit the podcast now. Welcome to our new listeners. It's the free one. That's ideal. That way you keep all the secrets and embarrassing talk locked behind a like a moat of inaccessibility.

A moat of bits that cannot be mounted by the casual listener. For those of you just, oh well, for those of you who tuned in now or a few minutes ago, you are hearing the dulcet tones of our friend Tom Walker making his first free TF appearance. Hello. Tom, how's it going? Thank you for having me. I'm well. I'm sorry for not waiting to be introduced.

Lady of regret. Yeah, I'm afraid because you did not wait to be introduced, you will not be getting your third time appearance lounge access card. Yeah, we don't count this appearance. I understand. Yep. We're not going to be able to stamp the ticket. You are going to have to subsist on the cash bar and you're going to have to sit out in

the normal seats with everyone else waiting for the flights, but you do get a five dollar meal voucher. Oh, fantastic. Round of applause for Tom. We would like to waive the rule for Tom, but I think Tom understands that if we did it for him, you know, it would put us in a difficult position. Absolutely. I'm nothing more than a work.

She's on our asses. She's so often is. No, welcome to TF. It's TF and we have our friend Tom with us. And Tom has brought to sort of my attention an exciting new opportunity in the crypto space, which we are going to talk about in a couple of minutes. I think it's a way to get rich and quick. Join me in crypto space.

But first, I do want to do a UK politics corner. Oh, no matter of time before this Gorka coin, though. Yes. And we're going to make it. Gorka. The only coin that comes down heads twice, you know, how easy it is to make a crypto card. You could do it in like 20 minutes.

It's much like a holiday's in that way. Yeah, but I don't think there have been as many sort of naked Ponzi schemes as a mixing bowl. A hollandaise that you're encouraged to invest in this this batch of hollandaise I've just made. It's only going up. You should buy now and buy often. Yeah, give us a whole new meaning to buying the dip here all week, basically for American

listeners, Dominic Cummings, the man who realized that Britain was racist, a man who that is his real name. You cannot stress that enough. That's his main big name. Tom Cummings. He had two big realizations. One is Britain. British people will push the big racism button if you ask them to and two that everyone in

every insider in Westminster and their sort of media bubble surrounding it is a moron concerned with protecting their phony baloney jobs. And who is extremely easy to bully. Yeah. So basically, I have proved this empirically. Upon falling out with the government, he then ended up going on a big long, he ended up sort of testifying essentially in front of parliament, saying, look, actually, here's the real thing.

We had no plan for COVID at all in March. Nothing. They were making it up as they went along. They had zero. They had no planning. It's crazy because that didn't come across. Yeah. Well, if you wouldn't have thought that, I mean, if you read our fearless media and lobby

journalists, it definitely wouldn't have come across. No, if that was your only way of like, in many ways, I feel like a lot of people in Britain have a sort of Plato's cave thing going on where like, if you're only looking at the representations of Britain you find in the British press, you're living in an entirely different country. So effectively, what happened is we did no planning, nothing. There was over 100,000 people died because there was basically a bunch of guys in parliament who were making it up as they went along, a bunch of guys in number 10 rather.

Boris kept saying fun things like quite like chaos because it makes people turn to me. I think it was badass that he was like, yeah, give me COVID. I don't care. And then he went and got basically on purpose. Yeah. He wanted to be injected with COVID-19 by the chief medical officer on live TV. I quite like the Joker. Yeah.

And also, but also like, he was there being like, yes. And then, you know, it was like the Spider-Man meme and it's like, this is a stupid country for children. Yes. This is a dumb country. I hate it. But the upshot of this was that he tried to get our special boy fired. Yeah.

Oh, well, you can't know that that is going too far. We have all of us, including Tom, watch the clip of, and I believe we included it as the cold open in the episode, Matt Hancock being asked about this, just grabbing a line from inside his head about taking the vaccine. And then like a fucking badass, just running away from the reporter. He's literally for a scum. Like he is completely brainless. He just says whatever comes into his head, but to the point where it confuses everyone

around him so much that he just keeps being promoted. And then he literally runs away. This is the most sad move I've ever seen. Gently jogging away from the scene, a strategy that works as well for Matt Hancock as the hillside strangler. I thought it was so cool. Genuinely, it looked to me like he was an open world video game character who just finished a quest.

When you hand in something, you're like, oh, well, off to the next thing and you just turn and fucking sprint. I think if you want to think about what Matt Hancock is, you know, like you're going to round here, Hancock. Matt Hancock. Chicken chaser. Do you chase chickens? Matt Hancock is essentially a, he gives the side quest that's the comic relief in the

Witcher game. Hmm. I think if you're having trouble with drowners, maybe call a Witcher. Yeah, that's right. Um, just again, just a completely just non function, the elite of this country is non functional. It has been non functional for a fucking while. Um, and I also, it's like we get the, it's one of these things as well where you just

have to deal with being Cassandra where everyone knew, or at least everyone who sort of applied some critical thought to it knew that's not many people. That Laura Coonsburg was basically just tweeting out what, what, what dominant coming center over WhatsApp was obviously that was the case. Then he said, yeah, the main person I was in contact in the media was a Laura Coonsburg, which the BBC then silenced when he said it. Yeah. Yeah.

They cut away from it, didn't they? They took, they hadn't announced a talk over it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's, it's like, um, the entire, the entire sort of elite stratosphere of this country is just constantly like Bud Dwyer ring itself with a Nerf gun embarrassing constant failures and national television that they're all trying to cover up from one another. And the Tories are up another six points.

I love it. It's great. They have like a million situation going on, but for the polls where like the more they try and like lose the election, just the more popular they get. Well, like also as the Labour Party have been handed this massive slow moving soft pitch right down the middle, what have they gone on, gone on TV and the radio to talk about? It's Jeremy fucking Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn!

Awesome. I love that. That's cool. So right now what we have is we, when everyone's zigging, you got a zag. We have, we've, they basically have said Jeremy Corbyn should apologize for the free Palestine marches. Jeremy Corbyn should reveal his, this was called from, the next one was called for from Neil Coyle, MP for Bermondsey in Old Southwark, was like, Jeremy Corbyn fiddled his expenses

on the basis of like, we got too many donations for his legal campaigns. I like old Southwark because it's like the old, the old village, the old timey village in Southwark. Yeah. We have to apologize to the public for allowing Jeremy Corbyn to be our candidate because if he wasn't, then we would be ahead in the polls, even though he isn't now and we aren't ahead of the polls. And the third one was the intimation from someone in Starmer's office that Corbyn didn't

take the vaccine because he's an anti-vaxxer, even though he's been campaigning to get the vaccine more widely distributed. Amazing. The mistook him for his brother or something, but what's crazy also, the thing that makes you feel most insane is that literally the only person who in the prominent in the sort of the British media and political ecosystem who saw this coming and in retrospect called for all for what were the right decisions was him. The only person is because like everybody, everyone in Britain, I think, since maybe

Harold Wilson, the entire sort of British political media elite have been slowly turning themselves insane. They have been, they have just been, they've been subjecting themselves to like, they've been subjecting themselves to a kind of like, I don't know, the Ludovico technique, but where you watch like a video of an automated Amazon warehouse and then like, I don't know, like Patrice Lumumba's inauguration ceremony, you just get driven slowly, slowly, slowly insane until basically Jeremy Corbyn was the only sane person left. And so of course he was going to be shunned by everyone else because Jeremy Corbyn was

too vegetarian to like eat beef burgers in the nineties. That's exactly right. He didn't get mad cow like all the others got. And so now like the fact that he's basically able to like see like, oh, there appears to be this global pandemic, perhaps we should lock down that, of course, the opinion needed to be, you know, ruthlessly suppressed, of course, Jeremy Corbyn should actually apologize because when he said all of the good things we should do, that is what prevented them from ever being done.

As soon as he said, Hey guys, maybe we should do this thing, which is obviously a good idea. Robins are, well, now Jeremy Corbyn said it, so we have to do the opposite of that. I'm sorry, that's the rules. Yeah, we're not anti-Semites here and so effective. I mean, look, it's I've been thinking a lot about Seawrite Mills recently and just this and this idea where like where there is an elite policy making this idea of crackpot realism where you just turn yourself where you turn yourself so insane that he was using it to describe the foreign policy in the 1950s under Eisenhower, where it was like, we need

to engineer, in order to keep humanity safe, we need to engineer thousands more nuclear bombs that will annihilate humanity from the world effectively in order to prevent a nuclear like these kinds of just on their face insane things, but that because they're said by serious people in gray suits, you sort of end up having to do and it's just this how a whole way of being and seeing the world has permeated every single element of of culture and political life on this island to the point where it seems like anything but a completely bizarre crackpot opinion, anything that it will sort of, I don't know, sensibly materially deal with the world as it is presented to us that is, you know, not sort of hold up in this

nuanced fantasy land of of, you know, like a retail politics is completely beyond the pale, which is it is makes you crazy to live here. It really does. Mostly mostly again, because of the BSE. Yes, it's exactly right. That is right. It's just mad cow and lead. It's just this entire island. Anyway, hey, Tom, how's Albo doing?

Oh, he's great, brother. Thanks so much for checking in. I know everything about our politics. Nothing about yours, but boy, oh boy, am I well informed. We've got a bunch of these guys over here, much like yours. Well, you also have guys down there. Oh, yeah, all sorts. But hey, upside down.

I want to guys, nonetheless. Let's stop talking about guys that I want to get out of UK politics corner. Tom, you, you, you and I sort of, well, you on your stream and me as your loyal, a loyal member of your chat. You're sent. Yeah, me as me as your, you notice me, Senpai. Discuss Senpai. I said, simp.

Yes. Well, I said, I said something else. Senpai. Yeah. So when you simp so much, you get a sort of eye condition discovered, discovered this, this new cryptocurrency thing called girlfriend.finance, which appears to be a Belarusian startup aiming to disrupt relationships. Generally, girlfriend.finance is girlfriend, but also cryptocurrency. But actually it's made from potato.

Yeah, except the last thing. That's basically what it is because potato would have given it too much value. Tom, what's, what's, what's the deal with girlfriend.finance? And why is it sweeping the nation of Belarus? Yeah, thank you so much, Riley. I'm happy to take this girlfriend.finance seems to be a very optimistic and also genuinely for me, incredibly surprisingly poorly executed across the board idea.

The idea seems to operate from two separate attack vectors to the crypto idiot. As far as I can tell, they are, they are an appeal to the simp, whereas as Alice deemed Riley, that you will purchase an NFT of your favorite star or models relationship status. And then you will have a series of numbers that say that you are the boyfriend of Cara Delevingne or whatever, or you and this is a, this is the narrative that they're pushing on their subreddit, which has three members that you and me are two of them.

They're pushing it to an elite circle of people. Yeah, yes. Yeah, well, three accounts, all of them employees, only two of them employees. I think one of them is double dipping accounts because Sue 8111 and Kitty 918 share pretty similar posting styles. Anyway, they made the other thing they're pushing. And this seems to be their final goal is to supplant marriage by making it instead of, in addition to buying a diamond ring,

you buy your fiance, an NFT of your relationship. Are you saying that we found something less ethical than diamonds? Yes, we finally found Alice a way to create a diamond by shoveling a bit of rainforest into a big fire. We found a way to make the De Beers company look moral. Yeah, they do two different kinds of mining. So what they've said is an NFT relationship tokenization for actresses and models to manage relationships with fans.

We aim to disrupt the way people relate to each other and the way people manage their money. It's not perfect, but we don't want to disrupt the basic evolution. There's some fucking neon Genesis Evangelion ship. We're going to all turn into a big lady trying. I'm trying. Are we all? So what I think Alice is going to get the surgery where we all are

subsumed into her in a sort of giant Megatron. So what I think is very interesting here is that the max supply is 20 million tokens. So there are, I mean, look, that's the many women as that can be. Yeah, there's a maximum. The hash rate of humanity can produce a maximum number of 20 million women. We did an analysis on the amount of total dimes out there. Like I'm talking a great day.

Oh, I'm doing the hourglass motion, but I'm doing it for a long time because it's an NFT. My wife's actually mining a daughter for us right now. She's got a rig set up in our uterus. Yeah, we got it through RTX 3080s in there. Oh boy, it was a tight squeeze, but now I'm really excited. So they say the end goal is to replace outdated governmental institutions with an intergovernmental blockchain organization that lets people

define their romantic familial and personal relationships. Why? Why? These people never ask themselves why? They just have age of consent reasons, I suspect. Well, you just you just what you do is you have an idea for something you can put on the blockchain. And then the idea is to put it on the blockchain as fast as possible and then get as much Ethereum as fast as possible.

On Alice's note there, there is an interesting post on the subreddit, which is, again, made by a member of the company that is like, this 18 year old girl I am seeing asked me if we are official. So I bought her the NFT of our relationship. Now, this did not happen, but one day it will. Won't you get on board with girlfriend.finance? Is this just like has one of these AIs that makes YouTube kids videos just become sentient and decided to try to find love?

I remember when I get all of my girlfriends to like swap heads. So, yeah, it's cool. Also, the dating Peppa Pig and also Wonder Woman. Anyway, there's a graphic here that says actresses, singers and models sell NFT relationships to fans and the example organizations are Twitch streamers. So, Tom, for example, you can sell an NFT. I've already bought Tom Tom Walker. Well, there's a bidding war.

Tom Walker is my girlfriend now. Well, my NFT is. Yeah, I sold my NFT to Milo the same way Bart sells his soul to Millhouse. That's right. Well, it's Twitch. You're turning driving a truck over Tom Walker's NFT. Which YouTube and Instagram are all on there as are the Grammys and the Oscars. So you could date Oscar from Oscars with an NFT.

Yeah, that's right. That's why they get a shiny gold fellow. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right. It's right in there. I've heard of a trophy husband, but this is ridiculous. And now that's fun for everybody. Well, they didn't let the Oscar statue was based on that guy

because he was shiny and gold. The goldest actor in Hollywood, but he was lost on the black and white era. Basically, right? Like the premise here seems to be this is again, this is not going to go anywhere. I think it's just like some bizarre Belarusian project. And there have been a few over the years. Let's be real. They are good, but they are they say they want to quote incentivize females

to embrace the new normal of relationship. OK, females is an immediate red flag. As soon as you see someone saying females, I'm immediately like nutcases. Yeah. Yeah, not trying to incentivize females. We're trying to incentivize females to embrace the new normal of relationship tokenization and blockchain relationship management. Get on board with the future, everyone.

Yeah, I mean, any females out there want to get incentivized? Yeah, I'm tenting my fingers now. This female dome got me incentivized. You receive incentivization. So basically, the idea is like Bella Thorne, for example, she can have her, you know, boyfriend, she can be dating Chet Hanks or whatever in Hollywood. Yeah. But also know that you own her NFT.

Yeah, you can own one or you or she can have some kind of like, you know, harem of guys who are all trading Bella Thorne's. And again, the thing is because the I guess their claim that it's somehow significant is that Bella Thorne would have minted the NFT from her ethereum wallet. Yeah. And if Bella Thorne, if you are buried with that NFT, you wake up in the afterlife with Bella Thorne. Yeah, that's right. As your servant.

But if your heart, if your heart weighs more than a graphics card, then your soul gets turned into an NFT of like Pauly Shore of his girlfriend. Oh, no. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, Milo, you're you're going to a shore town, I'm afraid. Shit. I hope you like the movie in the army now. Who knew that Amit to the Devourer was such a big fan of Pauly Shore? Mm hmm.

Me as a charm. That's right. It makes sense. I have so I I have joined the girlfriend.finance discord. Uh huh. I am a member of a vibrant community. Thank you so much for asking, Milo. I am the 11th member of the girlfriend.finance discord.

Yeah. Yeah, the subreddit is absolutely dead. It is a fucking waste land and there is one person there who seems to be having kind of similar feelings to us. But the thing he is chasing is kind of trying to nail them down on. I'm going to sell my GF's NFT without her permission. I'm going to mint an NFT in the name of my girlfriend and dating my girlfriend. And then I'm going to sell it to someone. And then they're basically trying to tell him, well, no, you that's that wouldn't be cool.

And he's like, yeah, but I can't do it with your system, right? And they're like, well, yeah. Of course you can do it. Of course you can do it. I mean, like the guys who invented the dark web, like, well, and now you shouldn't do that. I mean, you totally can. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to we're going to ask if you could stick to, like, drugs. You know, drugs are fine, but maybe that other thing, maybe don't do that.

We can't stop you. I can't stress that enough. We really, we can't. Really, honestly, I can't. Yeah. Um, I think it's sort of, if there's to be a takeaway from, like, look, I don't think girlfriend.finance is about to redefine anyone's relationship anytime soon, but do be on the lookout for more, more attempts to disrupt

something about your life with NFTs because it's coming. Yeah, it's been disrupted. It's going to every single time. It's there's no example of a time when it's not stupid. There's not one example of a time when it's not stupid to use that particular system. What about cancelling a guy for buying an NFT of an underage girl? Yeah, you got a weird age gap in this NFT. Yeah.

We're doing the maths here and it looked like you minted this when she was 17. Oh, you at least started the process is twirling when she was, Oh boy, you're not coming out here. Well, here champ, starting the process is twirling. Yeah, get that NFT twirling for me, champ. Pulling the big crank that says NFT to maximum. I also looked up Tatiana Sterilatko, who seems to be the kind of, uh, she's she's the face of the movement.

She's the head of a, uh, Belarusian IT company. Okay. Would you guys like to hear another project that she, uh, her company has worked on? I would love it. In 3D police car parking, we have implemented as many as 20 types of parking. Okay. It's a game for, uh, Android phones. Tom, what are the types of parking?

We have opened up a pocket dimension. You can park cop cars then. Yeah. Any one of these can meet the driver when driving around the city in real life. Each of the levels is much more difficult than the previous one and requires a certain skill, skill and experience. Is this, is this a game? Is it the driver lies in the fact that at the slightest mistake, the mission has

to be repeated until the car takes the perfect parking position. So wait, she, she made a game where you park a cop car. I believe she, uh, her company was used to outsource a phone game where you park a cop car. Uh, and you, and I think you'll be playing that on stream. I'm immediately really interested in it. Yeah. Genuinely, unfortunately.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Cause what, what is more thrilling than parking a car? That's what people love. If you ask any driver what their favorite part of driving it is, it's parking the car. I, I, I went into the, the, the video game shop and asked what, what, what's the game that every boy wants? That's right.

Yeah. This is definitely the Lea Carvello's putting challenge of Grand Theft Auto five. Um, Tom, do you have any more on, on girlfriend.finance or, uh, when, where can viewers find you? Can they, can they bid on you yet? I mean, we've already bid on you. You know what?

Weirdly, if you just type in girlfriend.finance, I have emailed Tatiana and she has not gotten back to me. Okay. So this is a public call Tatiana, right? To her in Russian. Get in touch with Tom. Also Anna and Lucy, please, uh, make a cameo for Tom. I've tried to get one for him.

All right. All right. I assume she listens. Well, look, this is a free one. Yeah. This is what we're doing. This is what we're doing for our friend Tom here. Uh, no, so I want to move on a little bit from, uh, a little bit of, um, a big

stoop from a stupid cryptocurrency thing that will obviously never work to a stupid cryptocurrency thing that will obviously never work. Uh, get another jarring transition. Yeah. Because basically the last, as of the recording, look, cryptocurrency is so volatile that I'm not willing to say what it's going to be doing between when we're recording this and when it comes out. But at the time of recording, basically, uh, Bitcoin is like halved from its

all-time high value, largely because Elon Musk tweeted about it. Awesome. Uh, he said, uh, we're no longer going to accept Bitcoin for Tesla. This was about a week ago, a couple weeks ago. Um, and then Bitcoin started sliding and crashing and a number of other things happened as well. Korea has cracked down on mining. China has cracked down on mining and, uh, the U.S.

has not cracked down on mining. So I'm just going to, on my little scoreboard here that says President Xi versus President Biden put a little tick in the President Xi column. Joe Biden does not know what Bitcoin is. That is the key issue there. So what has effectively happened is, yeah, that China is like, yeah, we're going to, oh, I see a bunch of, a bunch of mining pools are just wasting all this money. Uh, we are going to, uh, crack down on it.

Um, and like, also like, let's, let's not kid ourselves. Like, uh, any intelligence community probably loves Bitcoin. Uh, it is free, untraceable money that you can fund all kinds of really dark shit with and not have to be accountable to any kind of troublesome church committee commission rather. Um, so the CIA are accountable to the church. Yes. Um, so, uh, effectively right.

What is, what has happened is, um, you know, number one cryptocurrency. Yeah. It's an asset class that trades on the basis of its proximity to Elon Musk, how much he likes it. And if he thinks it's epic, uh, which is just great. Uh, also, whenever you talk about the Elon Musk girlfriend.experience, it's right. Bitcoin is just an Elon musk girlfriend.cryptocurrency.

I'm selling this NFT of grams. Yeah. That has made me immeasurably sad. Well, it was unprepared for the gut punch. That's what I'm on this podcast for. Oh, that sucks. Look, it sucks. The other thing is, whenever we talk about cryptocurrency,

I'm, from now on, I'm going to make a point to cite what its electricity consumption is based on the Cambridge Bitcoin electricity consumption index. As of right now, it is, uh, the Netherlands. It is consuming one Netherlands of electricity. Yeah. It's not going to be anywhere near as much food polish though, to be fair to it. Yes. That's right.

Netherlands can't be that. My goodness. What? Well, my goodness, it's a whole freaking country this thing. Anyway, uh, some sort of Nether region. I don't imagine it's a whole country, but there, there are a bunch of reasons consuming the, the energy of many, many honks. That's right.

That is right. There are many things that have happened as well since then. So, uh, the day after Elon sort of said he was no longer thrilled about Bitcoin, as we mentioned last week, uh, the US dollar tether asset back asset mix was revealed to be, like Chris packets, um, a few discarded, discarded, uh, soda cans. Yeah. Several bow. Yeah, uh, just nothing really.

Um, anyway, and, uh, also don't forget, uh, Tesla, their profit last quarter was just selling Bitcoin. That's what they made money doing. Yeah, because it's a car company. That's how you make money when you're a car company, is you buy Bitcoin, and then you tweet about Bitcoin being good, and then you sell the Bitcoin, and then you say Bitcoin's bad actually. He still has a lot, so it might, might, might make a loss on it, but. Yeah.

I don't know why he said Bitcoin was bad. I've got, well, it, I understand why he said it was good. If you, uh, think it's like a big number that he has in a bank account, and he likes to hit it with a tweet every now and again to make it sting. Coin and bit torture. Yeah, there's, there's, uh, there is an explanation for it. I think I mean, look, I don't know for sure, but I'd imagine if you're somebody who likes to buy Bitcoin and your tweets can change the, um, value of Bitcoin, you want to buy some Bitcoin,

you might as well tweet and then buy Bitcoin if I, if I was to be a betting man. Yeah. Um, so anyway, what, what all of this, the end result of all of this is basically that like with the China crackdown as well, like having the value basically means that, um, the logic of cryptocurrency, when it's value goes down, means it's easier to mine. So it's more complicated than that, but like, let's just sit with that for now. What's happened is they've now created as it's not just, uh, Musk,

but, uh, Michael Saylor and a number of other sort of, you know, um, rich nitwits have created Michael Saylor. Yeah. He's the. Mr. Dr. Mike Saylor. He's the CEO of MicroStrategy, a company. CEO of MicroSaylor. Uh, uh, a company, no, it's a MicroStrategy was like a software company that realized

it could make a lot more money just by holding a lot of Bitcoin rather than doing anything. Yeah. Which is what is that? The normal business of boats. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

Um, anyway, so what's very interesting in this bottle is a very small strategy. What I find very interesting is that, um, what they've done essentially is they've created a mining consortium in America where they're going to like have transparent, they're going to regulate Bitcoin mining and, but instead of a government, it's these guys. And what I think is very fun about this is, um, this weird libertarian experiment has, uh, now it has ended. Well, it's beginning to reverse engineer something that looks like a central bank.

Yeah. Because the only way you can have a currency that works is to have a central bank. So they've just had to invent one, uh, which is very funny. So sailor said, uh, I think the first step is let's come up with a protocol for us to publish energy information in a way that we can share it with the world and then work together to make sure that we pursue sustainable energy goals. So basically what they're saying is that they can mine artisanal bitcoins with like hydroelectricity. And that I love an artisanal bit and that those are going to be, you know,

worth more because they're going to have like an ESG premium of some kind, which is ludicrous. Uh, but you know, it's, they've, again, like there are many, many steps between this and being a central bank, but having a central governing organization for your stupid libertarian currency is basically like the day in Colonia, Dignidad, when they realized, hang on a second, we need all, we need to get together to club some money together to pay for a water purifier and a doctor and so on and so on. But of course then Colonia Dignidad didn't do that and it was a very interesting story of what happened after that.

The trouble with all these, which I presume is it was fine. The problem with all these central banks is they're propping up all those pesky age of consent laws. We can keep all of the like monetary policy, but we need to do something about that. Yeah. What if we had a central bank that was full of like Reddit guys? So they said the organization would be funded by dues from member minors. So like, again, in the U.S. I thought you said funded by dudes. No, I was like, yeah, that's right. I mean, it would be and probably find supplemental revenue streams.

Certified minors benefit for increased demand for artisanally mined coins from investors. Because we say they will be. A fair trade Bitcoin. Effectively, yes. And again, look, there's a pretty, a lot of clear blue water between, between like this and a central bank, but they do seem to be creating a government to solve a cold. They're taking steps in that direction.

They seem to be solving a coordination problem with their currency by creating some rule. I thought this was supposed to not be that. Yeah. Interesting. But like when you and Goldman just released a report on it as well, which I've read because this is what I do, I guess you read stuff. Yeah. Michael Novogratz, the co-founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital Holdings,

said that Bitcoin is a good store of value, despite the fact that it is no income, no practical uses, extremely high volatility and so on. By saying, look, stores of value are social constructs. They have value because we believe they do. There has never been a more successful brand created in a short period of time. It's like they floated the baby in the river. The community raised the baby and it's now worth about a trillion dollars. But like the holdings of it are so incredibly concentrated that basically,

I don't know, like 200 guys and a couple of mining consortiums basically decided this was an asset class and now it is. And the trick that's being played by the guys doing the mining pool and being like, oh, where are you on Musk? And we're going to do artisanal Bitcoin mine from hydroelectricity. Like that's still taking green electricity out of the power grid and using it for this thing that just burns surplus. Yeah. It's a waste of time.

It is. It is. It is the creation of exchange value with no use value. It is just burning things that could be made to make your life better as instead just going into a big oven that then comes out as, you know, a fun internet money for guys with laser eyes in their profiles on Twitter. Yeah. And, you know, the interesting thing is that's an important constituency and we wouldn't want to disenfranchise them. Yeah.

We do love to see that funny line go up and down and make everyone sad or happy as well. And but the thing is it doesn't. So now, right, because enough rich people have just said it's an asset class. And then that but that's only part one of the trick. Part two of the trick is saying is is then shocking gently away. Part two of the trick is then saying, oh, creating like, if almost like the like the ratchet effect, right?

Where you create the best possible condition is an environmentally responsible Bitcoin, right? Where now it's like, well, you can have the irresponsible Bitcoin in China or you can have the responsible Bitcoin from here. But there's no version of the world where we don't just burn all the excess energy that could be going to literally fucking anything else. Yeah. The entire thing.

Like if they're like, I'm not for carceral solutions to things generally. But if the if the American state could somehow just like, I don't know, go and dismantle every single Bitcoin mining rig in the country, it would make the world an immeasurably better place. Yeah. I mean, and also like the US, they've put so many people in jail already. Why not just expand this by like 20 guys? Yeah.

In fact, release 20 other guys you've already got in jail, like for weed or something and replace them with those guys. It won't even increase the level of carceralness so we can be in favor of it. It's fine. Do that and then she'll be better. Yeah. I think give everyone a full gaming PC. You know, you got your RGBs, your LEDs, your SSDs, all that stuff,

just minus a graphics card and let this work itself out. Just deny them a graphics card. They'll figure out where those things are hiding and there'll be some number 11 freaks getting absolutely robbed. So what's interesting right in this Goldman report is all the Bitcoin guys talk like they're on a mission from God. So Novogratz says right now the Blues Brothers 3 Bitcoin Novogratz says at the and a core group of crypto people see is as this and I quote the Blues Brothers here,

a mission from God. No, I gotta go see the Penguin and by that I mean Elon Musk. They want to rebuild the infrastructure of financial markets in a way that's more transparent and egalitarian and doesn't rely on governments. After that, he says, look, one of the main reasons people have gotten excited about Bitcoin recently is that we're worried that we have an unsustainable balance of monetary and fiscal policy that will eventually set off an inflationary spiral. More and more Americans are in favor of paying for college for people whose families earn less

than 100K annually. Biden just gave half of the 1.9 trillion stimulus packaged directly to people who need it. But capital tends to be taxed and given to labor. None of that is fiscally prudent. There's no political imperative to stop spending money. Basically, if you're a rich guy and you can't afford to build a spaceship, the whole idea of Bitcoin is you're going to find places where there are cheap energy and then hoard it to find a version of money so you can create a little society for yourself

where all of the poor politely die. Yeah, yeah. I enjoy, actually, there's a lot of parallels to the Blues Brothers because it's like the bit in the Blues Brothers where the Blues Brothers get to the country bar first and they pass themselves off as the country band, the good old boys, and then the good old boys show up and they're like, oh, have you come to see the good old boys? And they're like, but we're the good old boys. And then that's basically what's happening with the mining consortium.

The Chinese are already there mining it. What I really want to happen, what we want to happen is the end scene where every carp and National Guardsman in Chicago is separately pointing a gun at the Blues Brothers but the crypto guys. That's right. That's right. It fully, like a sensible polity would make this entirely illegal, would destroy this market overnight.

It is a basically an all-consuming monster that needs to be stopped before it's too late. Crypto sucks. My understanding of crypto is the way I've been able to make it make sense to me is either it's paying a big machine that burns a 100-year-old oak a second just to add one plus one for the rest of eternity, or I think of it like you get to make it an NFT where you run a car on a treadmill for three months and you just gun that thing at 80 kilometers an hour. And then at the end of it, you get, I don't know, the number five, but you're sure. Yeah, it's more or less it.

It's like this show brought to you by this number five. Yeah, this one. And no one else has this one number five. No, yeah, they can use it. Yeah, look at it. They don't have it. No. Only use it.

Does that say that it belongs to them? Yeah, yeah. If you count the 10, someone's counting with your number. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's a whole new generation of guys being sold bridges. Yeah, just being on the dating app and being like, hey, you ever used the number five? That's actually mine. You actually have to give me your number because I bet it contains a five.

Yes. You have to give all the fives from your number. Yeah, that's right. Moving to an area code with a five in it just to increase my chances on the apps. I got a skill align that only works in, I don't know, Westport. Yeah. Is there a five in your number? Yeah, that's right.

So I want to move us on a little bit to talking a little bit about something that SoftBank has done. Boy, this is going to be good. Oh, yeah. Groovy. This episode full of insane cockamamie business ideas that will never work and also cryptocurrency. That's right.

I think like, look, girlfriend.finance is the only difference between it and most SoftBank backed companies is that girlfriend.finance is less slickly marketed. Yeah, it doesn't have millions of dollars. It could change. Masayoshi-san invest girlfriend.finance. Mr. Masayoshi, could you please? You don't understand. We could own Bella Thorne.

So Lemonade is a SoftBank backed insure tech firm. David Cameron is going to start working for girlfriend.finance. Yeah. Yeah. That's trash thing Rishi Sunak. Yeah. I hope you're doing well in the heart of the machine. Got a really interesting company for you about buying pussy.

All best PC. Have you heard of Bella Thorne? I've been on Reddit in sales and they're talking about government-issued girlfriend. Are you on the subreddit, Rishi? I've got a JPEG of Emily Ratajowsky that I'm willing to let go for a most competitive price. We're willing to accept taxes in JPEG. You slipped into sort of a Mandelson there, but it was still good. I don't know what he fucking sounds like.

I was swinging. I was going to say to my fans. The very buttery staircase. So Lemonade is this is this. Buttering up a rack of graphics cards. Lemonade is a soft bank backed insurance company. That's not as a drink. Shouts out to Idaho Bones on Twitter who helped me a lot putting this together.

Idaho Bones. Yeah. So there's a lot to be discussed and like their corporate structure is very weird and stuff. One of the latest series of books. That's right. She goes to Idaho. It all moves to Idaho. Anyway, today I just want to focus on one thing which is their AI claims process.

So by the company is valued at over $5 billion. They claim to be disrupting insurance for your usual people who like disruption, your millennials and Gen Z people who don't like owning things. So they do renters insurance, which they make gangbusters on. Homeowners insurance. They have almost no clients on and pet insurance, which is basically unregulated. And what I find very interesting is a lot of their engagement in the media has been basically completely uncritical.

So the following is a Guardian headline from a couple of years ago, and it wasn't like Guardian in partnership with Lemonade. This is just a Guardian article. Okay. How artificial intelligence could help make the insurance industry trustworthy? Great. NYC based Lemonade hopes to reverse the poor reputation of insurance companies by using technology and behavioral science to appeal to younger customers.

At least get paid for this if you're going to do it. It's the same article. So how does this work? Is this like they send one of those Boston robotics dogs in to like kick your car in the tires or something to check what's going on? They put the racism on a computer, which makes it like good. So anyway, they basically like, you know, made a little oopsie on the internet where they accidentally admitted that they use AI profiling for claims, people who file claims.

Yeah. And then they did a fantastic post afterwards where they were like, we do not do phrenology one of four. So Lemonade, they say, in the original thread is built a digital substrate using bots and machine learning to make insurance instant, seamless and delightful. Shut the fuck up. God damn it. Can't get enough delight in my insurance.

So they say where customers usually have to fill in Have enough precision in your soup. 20 to 40 questions on a normal application. Lemonade announced basically that it's like, yeah, we actually have an AI chatbot that collects as much as 1600 data points from a single video of a customer answering 13 simple questions. Yeah, but there's the problems that like 1200 of them are like skin color. Yeah.

Well, I feel like this, this also, even if it isn't racist, this feels like when you're in a bad relationship and you have a conversation with someone and they get angry at you because like you're both angry at the person that you're believing the other person to be. You know, like you just lack, like, oh, no, I'm happy with my insurance and the AI somewhere will just be like, that's a risk. This person is absolutely going to take their own life. So here's the thing, Alice.

This AI keeps saying I'm suicidally depressed. Where is this coming from? So Alice, to your point that you say, yeah, it could very well be a phrenology app, but I think looking at their like loss ratio and stuff, it's much more likely that this is nothing. Oh, it's a phrenology app that doesn't work. Yeah, it's a phrenology app that doesn't do anything because there is so much bullshit just in those couple of claims.

I can't believe they besmirched the noble name of phrenology by not implementing it. So like, for example, the amount of information you're allowed to actually use in writing, underwriting an insurance claim is very, very limited and very, very regulated. So like there aren't 1600 data points you could use. There are vastly less. Most of that information they're collecting is for marketing. Like you can't, you cannot make a decision based on that information. It's illegal.

And you're saying he had how many Wonder Woman standees in the background? No, well, no, that's same. That seems personal. They also say our AI analyzes videos because when you make a claim, basically they use behavioral science and they have like a Malcolm Gladwell that works for them. Awesome. Who was like actually people. It's even bigger.

Well, he was like actually people don't think he's has like a book called like the trust equation. And it's something like this. I like how it's a Malcolm Gladwell. Like he's just reproducing himself. Yeah, you've got the Ukraine and you've got a Malcolm Gladwell. It's called Dan Ariely. And he's always giving Ted talks and writing bullshit books. Like the kind of book we would read with Felix.

Dan Arielyny. Ariely. Inventory Ariola. So, but he says that so and he's basically like yeah, people won't lie if they're looking at a video of themselves. And if they sign a pledge pledging to be honest. So basically what Lemonade said is we can remake the whole insurance industry by using AI to analyze a bunch of stuff.

We're not actually allowed to analyze. And then making people sign like a loyalty oath to the company. A loyalty oath. Yeah, more or less. And so like the way they make sure you're not lying is to just mirror your webcam back to you. That's one of the big things that they do. This is genuinely like one of the biggest pieces of junk science since it came. It like became popular knowledge that photos of eyes deter thieves.

And so therefore after that every bike stand, every bike rack had like a big poster with like thieves. We're watching you with a pair of eyes on it. That's just a butterfly. That's just a moth. That's a moth's predator strategy. Also, I think I like I did a lot of improv earlier in my life. Look at me.

I've done a lot of stealing. And it says one thing I know. Yeah, I tell you what I'm trying to say is I've lied to myself a lot. Like I've pulled myself out of some real deep holes by lying to myself. I don't have any problem with being dishonest with myself. So basically, right? Like again, this is all just sort of woo woo hype shit because this is another example of a big soft bank backed firm where the main client isn't you.

It's not the person going in and taking out insurance. It's investors. It's like we've got this because if you think about this, right? Greensill, they said, oh, we have this wonderful technology. Well, like then they had like a third party invoice processing system and then a bunch of marketing. Yeah, that was one guy in Australia. And in this case, Lemonade is like, oh, yeah, we have these amazing AI chatbots that

collect a bunch of information we're basically not allowed to use at the core of our business. And then our AI fraud detectors actually like they went accused of, but hey, that's phrenology. They were like, no, no, no, no, they don't actually make any important decisions. No AI makes an important decision by itself. No, no, we kept trying to remove that, but it's just hanging around. Yeah, the AI does nothing. It does nothing.

No, I promise. It's just, it's just hello world. And then we put some calipers in there. I don't know. We don't know how to stop it from telling us you're black, but it doesn't do anything. Our AI may have called you the N word, but I promise you that made no effect on me here. And so it was doing it in the Chinese way where it's pausing. And so basically, right?

Any time you see a company saying that they're doing AI recognition or any kind of AI processing, AI emotional recognition through nonverbal cues, chances are it's not even phrenology. Chances are it's just bullshit. It's just nothing. It's just scams. Yeah. And because then they said, oh yeah, our AI is non-deterministic and has been shown to have bias and so on and so on.

That's why we don't let AI perform deterministic actions. We've put the AI on light duties and it's going to have to attend mandatory training. But the funny thing is, if you look at their S1 form, which they filed to go public, they said that the core of their business is their AI algorithm. So what I ask you is, if you can't price policies based on most of the information that you're taking in from your chatbot and you don't use AI to automate decisioning, how is it the core of your business? What is it doing?

You could sell the data that you gather. It's being cool. Yeah. I think this is what happens when the CEO's AI son needs a cushy job. This is like a version of her where Joaquin Phoenix actually did fuck the AI and this is their kid getting a do nothing job at Lemonade. They've given the AI a Flintstone phone. It's that Lemonade's customer base is investors, not you.

And investors are children who like jingling keys, basically. Apparently so, yeah. Very funny. And also, they're claimed, by the way, that you're able to use AI to revolutionize insurance. I looked at their actual, and again, this is where I thank you to Idaho Bones for your help. I looked at this and it's like, yeah, they claimed it was 71% loss ratio, which is like, the benchmark for the industry is like, a competitor of theirs would make 31%. A benchmark is like 40 to 70%.

It's how much money you lose on claims, basically. They're at 71%, but they're still a young company. So it's like, you get gets down over time as you get better information. But they just neglected to include natural disasters in that because it was unusual. You're an insurance company. Yeah. Well, you don't insure for stuff that doesn't usually happen. That's not what insurance is for.

You buy insurance against stuff that happens all the time. So they claim that they have a 71... And in their Twitter thread, they claim they had a 71% loss ratio, where they were like, wow, this is amazing. This is half of what it was. But if you add in the number that they lost in the Texas snowstorm, which their 10Q form, their quarterly financial report did, it climbs to 120%. This is extremely high.

This is very high. Hitting my robot as it continues to hand buckets and buckets of $100 bills to the people with policies. Just hitting it with a broom, but you can't overpower it. Yeah. So it's not even that this thing is racist. It's just another soft bank nothing. Yeah.

I better keep filling these buckets of the robots with $100 bills. Otherwise, God knows what it'll do. And I think the real thing, being serious for a moment, is that if you're marketing yourself on providing a service based on surveillance, where people don't... Because if you fill in a form for an insurance thing, you fill in 20 to 40 questions. You know what questions you're answering.

You know what information you're giving them. But if you're being surveilled... They ask you what your job is, and you say podcaster, and they're like, your insurance premium has just doubled. That's right. But if you don't know what information is being taken from you, then you begin to regulate your own behavior because you don't know what you're actually saying.

So it almost doesn't matter that it doesn't work. If people believe it works, that's all that it really requires. Yeah, it's one of these panopticon things. Yeah, because it turns the human into an object of study, rather than say, you know, a person. I don't want that. No, you don't want to be an object of study. I'm pretty sure that the guard occupying that tower

isn't looking at me at this time. Exactly. I've got to stop jacking off because I've got my insurance meeting tomorrow. I've got such low self-esteem that being in a panopticon doesn't work on me because I'm like, who'd ever be looking at little old me? That's right. You can probably get away with whatever I want down here. Not that it matters.

All right. So I want to finish this off with an article I've been sitting on for a little while. Guy in the cell next to you being like, no, Tom, the guard totally looks at you all the time. Come on. No. Did he say that? Or did he look at you and then look at, I don't know, I don't care.

I don't care about the guard in the tower. It's fine. Whatever. I don't even think about it. Who of a year knows who Thomas Heatherwick is? It's a great name. The designer of the new Rootmaster. That's correct.

Thomas Heatherwick is... Oh, sorry. I was just going to say, Alice, a little while ago, you made a joke that someone was the inventor of areolas, and I can't stop thinking about how useful that guy would be. Because without the areolas, the nipple is such a rude shock. Yeah. It would be so fucked up.

Just this little fucking boonk. Yeah. The areola was kind of a fade-in to the nipple. Oh, it's essential. So, Alice, you know who Thomas Heatherwick is. The man who designed the bus. He is one of the... Of course, Alice knows who that is.

One of these British designers. He's a design guy. He's like a fucking like black turtleneck design guy. Indeed. He was also the designer of the garden bridge, the ill-fated garden bridge. What's the garden bridge? A white elephant project that cost London sort of...

One of Boris's deranged mega projects, where he was going to have a bridge with a park on it. And the estimate for that was like billions. Yeah, it's like a Saudi mega project, but without the follow-through. Basically, this was the guy that Boris went to as mayor of London, specifically, anytime he wanted to do something grandiosly and stupid.

Anytime he wanted to put in like a SimCity cheat code and just have a brutal jump a bunch, but then it wouldn't actually happen. Yeah. Is this in the same ballpark as like the London Eye? Is that that big wheel you guys love so much? Kind of, except those were like PFI's, whereas this is like public stuff

that Boris was trying to fund. And it was just designed by this one guy. Heatherwick also basically is involved in creating sort of large white elephant projects in New York City as well. He built a $200 million escalator to nowhere. Yep. Amazing, the suicide escalator.

Yeah, it's a large circular honeycomb escalator that people kept jumping off, so they had to like hide it from view, but it's the most expensive sculpture ever made. Your public art makes people kill themselves on it with. Great, yeah, that's actually part of it. Yeah, that's not a great review, if I'm honest. This is reminded me.

If I'm up into one show, you'd probably get the person to quit. He also designed the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony fire cauldron. Oh, great. Well, it was a good cauldron to be fair. If I needed a fire cauldron, I would go back to him. This just reminded me a while back I was in Brighton,

my most hated city in the United Kingdom, as regular listeners this show will know. And British Airways have been involved in a PFI there to build a sort of London Eye type thing, but instead of it being a carousel, it's like you get into like a big pod. Well, that's been there for a while. And it goes up a big pylon right to the top.

But of course, the view you get at the top is half just the sea. And then half of it is Brighton, which is like a bunch of Victorian houses. Why would you go on this? There's no skyline. This has been Milo's complaint about Brighton hour. But I mean, I think it's a deeply PFI energy, is what I'm saying.

I should also say about the escalators in nowhere that a bunch of people killed themselves on. It's in Hudson Yards. And it was like the centerpiece, big public art thing of Hudson Yards, the like mega gentrification bit. It was going to be like illegal to take photos of it. And if you did, Thomas Heatherwick

would own the copyright to those photos. So you're going to make this like a fucking real life NFT bullshit. Effectively, yeah. It looks like shit, by the way. Oh, yeah. It looks so bad. I just looked it up. And Hudson Yards, Hudson Yards in New York

is also not a place for humans to live. It's just no. It's a place for humans to kill themselves. All right. I want to see the sculpture. It's just a place for like people to put money to invest. None of this is for vessel apparently. It's all just, it all just is a parody of a place,

a parody of art, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this is, and for some reason, Thomas Heatherwick the last couple of weeks has just been like, oh yeah, it does look like shit. It looks like a pine cone. Has just been massively pushed by like all of the newspapers for some reason as like the person we have to talk to about reopening the world after the pandemic.

He said, the post pandemic world is opening up. And this was ably pointed out to us on Twitter by listener Will Jennings. The post pandemic world is opening up. And for those with decent careers and nice houses, it's good. It's a world of dropping kids off at school, commuting in your pants to your study, and no longer sniffing the armpits of your fellow tube travelers.

Some people are into that. That's not kink shame on this book. Finally, on returning to the office, we can start sniffing the seats. We've also dearly missed. So the danger for this... How has Carol's mask changed? The danger for the smug middle-aged people

is that, and this is him talking, is that they think they don't need to come in to the office because they'll be less relevant. The pulse of organizations will be about younger people who come together and learn together and push each other. So yet again, a guy whose main thing is like designing offices. He says he wants to design enticing offices, of course, is saying, come on, get people back into offices.

Get people back into offices. Really sexy like that. Can we see like those little offices where you look at it and you're like, oh, that office is showing a bit of ankle? Well, that's more or less what he says. Again, his actual thing is just, what if we did like a curved line with a shrub on it, but otherwise it was a normal office?

Yeah. What if your office is a big pine cone? Yeah. This is the kind of guy who wants the world to open up. The guy who's one big work makes people want to die. He's like, finally, people can go back to killing themselves by looking at my big thing.

Yeah, I mean, people said that that big pine cone thing was useless and a waste of time, but actually it wasn't useless because people were able to kill themselves using it. They just reopened it this month, right, after people kept killing themselves. And now the way that they've solved this is they've put up some signs saying, hey, don't kill yourself.

And you're not allowed to go up it alone. You have to have a buddy to go up the fucking escalator to nowhere who is presumably deputized to stop you from fucking killing yourself. I mean, that is an easy way to start an unlikely rom-com. It's like being in the KGB, like your partner is just constantly checking up on you and reporting back to the central community.

So what I find funny about this is this guy, right, that guy, the guy who did that, is now basically just being asked by every major media outlet in the country what he thinks he should do about returning to cities. Well, we should have a buddy system. He said, you may have seen him last week talking about a new car he designed

that sucks pollution out of the air. A new car he made that sucks. Okay. But that's not a real thing, is it? Have a weak car suck pollution out of the air. So he says, what I've invented in lockdown is a cake that makes you thinner. The more delicious it is.

It's called the Aero. Aero, okay, I love looking it up too. And it looks fucking awful. It looks atrocious. It looks like an electric razor, but it's got like transparent panels. It tells you, he made the Homer, effectively. It's got a full table in it.

You can unfold to make a dining room in the car. Okay, so when I've Googled Aero, a kind of vape has come up, which I bet you there's a vape pollution out of the air. Aero, just search Aero car. This is the most 3D printed fucking car that I've ever seen. Oh, yeah, I hate this. So he says, right, and this is a person interviewing him

in the studio says, in front of him, there is a plastic model of the car swishy and futuristic in the way that architectural models always are. Yeah, made it renderize. He has a dream for this car. He said, there are lots of songs from the 60s and 70s that mentioned cars that talk about how someone took the Chevy to the levy.

Why don't we sing about our cars anymore? We'll take the Chevy to the levy, the guy driving it. You're taking American Pie, a song that is famously nonsense. As an example of your inspiration. No one sings about cars anymore, Milo. Yeah, what the fuck is that? It turns into a bed inside. Here's the thing.

This is the most confusing car. He says, what if the car were another room? What if it were a useful stationary space, perhaps a study for those without the room? This is, wait, what this car is, it's like the red room in the haunting of Hill House. It's like the room that it is something different to every person who gets inside it.

But it's also like, what if your car was also a living room? Yeah, this feels like- I cannot afford either of those. Thanks, Tom. This feels like what a kid would say in the liminal space between when people think they're precocious and when they just figure out it's a different kind of stupid. Oh, yeah.

Wouldn't it be nice if everyone just got along and if a gun shot life into people? Yeah. I guess. Shut up. If you're such a fucking gifted child, you're right. Yeah.

He says, on the planet, there are 1.4 billion cars and each car has two square meters of space inside it. So we've got in the region of three billion square meters of real estate sitting there, which 90% of the time isn't being used. And that's the thing. If you're someone like Thomas Heatherwick, who has the brain of a precocious four-year-old,

then yeah, that does make sense. But if you think about it for more than a minute, you have to ask yourself, well, wait, how come in general, there are so many cars? And maybe the answer isn't, let's make them into playrooms. Perhaps the answer is there should be trains. No, people should sing about them more. And then that would make us...

They should only be convertibles because they don't enclose the space. Yeah. You should sing about your car. You should live. You should have your car be another room. It's so fucking bleak that this guy is getting all of the money in the world to turn huge swaths

of our existence into soft-play areas that people are then killing themselves on. Well, to be clear, the feature of the arrow is that it sucks pollution out of the air, but then it does pump it into the cabin of the car. It comes with a pipe already attached to the exhaust pipe and through the window. It's yet another suicide-enabling design.

This guy just wants people to die, and I respect that. He says, his next invention is a gun, but the barrel points a long U back at the holder. Oh, my God, he's a gunner. He says, he concedes that treating a car as a spare room may require cultural as well as technological change. Currently, if you... Is this describing being homeless?

What the fuck is happening? Also, does this guy not understand... He has misunderstood a very fundamental thing about cars, which is if on... Like, okay, be it either summer or winter, if you are sat in a car that is not running, it is going to be a very uncomfortable temperature. Oh, I'm sure he could invent something that will handle that.

Maybe it'll charge from the air ambiently, like Brian Rose thought that London did. Milo, why don't we just invent a fifth season that is the nicest temperature? Yeah, the perfect spring temperature for sitting in your car. So he says, currently... Why don't we simply invent the perfect day? Currently.

Oh, my God, he's so smart. What if every day was a perfect spring day? Currently, if you were to see a man sitting in a car by himself, you'd assume he'd had an argument with his partner or something. Okay, that's a weird form of projection. About to go somewhere. Nope, argument. It's certainly an argument.

I love this just sort of... That's really... That's such a, why does this Rorschach drawing look like my parents' fighting thing? And he says, right, it's just the solution to, again, these problems of overcrowding, pollution, of expensive real estate. Just some guy who is completely fucking inescapable.

Just gets like... Who's just, as you say, Alice, just gets to sort of have his soft play area just become reality. Is being like, yeah, what if your car was the sitting room? And then it just has to be taken seriously and written about in the mainstream press. Yeah, you're right. I guess that would suck in a different way to how things are now.

Yeah, you got it. Yep. The whole planet, he says, has homogenized buildings. Everything is generic. Housing has just all been bundled together. Work has been bundled together. You end up with somewhere that's dead during the day and somewhere else dead during the weekend.

I think you made one of those and had some yards. Yeah. And I don't know if you could solve that problem with whimsy. That's more of a political economic one. In order to drive the arrow, you have to have someone else in there with you. It's got a seat weight detection like a Tesla because if you drive it on your own, you will try and pilot it directly into a wall.

Very buttery car. And also, you note that when he says that it would, people want places to have personality, which dare to be wholehearted. So yeah, you're walking into your job at his words. Yeah, you're walking into your job at a call center and it's like the glass door slides open and it plays the fucking Rick Astley song from 10 years ago.

This guy makes the least personal things I've ever seen. Yeah, he just makes these like the minority report car or whatever. And then being like, yeah, this is actually humanistic. And look at this, as you walk into, yeah, your gig economy job as a telemarketer, you walk past a curved shrub and you are enticed back into work. It's just such cock-a-maning people. He made the new root master suck.

And that's not like an easy thing to do because the design there is it's a bus, but it has an open door at the back. And he found a way to fuck that up and give everybody heat stroke in the summer on the upper deck. Yeah, cool. We love our inescapable failures here in Britain. We love giving them just infinite amounts of money

and allowing them to reinvent up cities as more wholehearted, whatever the fuck that means. This guy fucking rules. I've got to like just in terms of his commitment to like slowly, but steadily cause harm, like just steadily working his way up the ranks of the supervillains. He's the Joker. He's got he's inflicting steady amounts of psychic damage

on the populace without them even knowing. Why kill them when they'll do it to themselves? Right, with this with this stupid ass car that we've reimagined as a living room. Thomas Joker, wait. Have you ever been on a bus and it's been very hot? I'm like a dog chasing an arrow. I wouldn't be able to fit in it if I'd caught it.

I think God does look like shit. What does a dog need an office for? I know we've been we've been running for a little while and I think it's getting a little bit a little bit late down there in Australia. So yeah, oh shit, 2.53 a.m. I think I'm going to bring us to a little close here and say, number one, Tom, thank you very much for coming on today. Hey, thank you for having me.

It's always a joy to learn things and then be very glad that I spend the rest of my life not learning them. Yeah, that's right. Spend the rest of your evening thinking about the inventor of Ariolas. Genuinely, Alice, you have no idea how grateful I am for them because what a rude shock without the Ariola to ease you into something. You look like an empire biscuit, you know? Yeah, when you look at the Ariola, you're like,

oh, I know what's coming up. I'm getting ready for you. He eases you into it. Yeah. Once you reach the Ariola, you know, sooner or later, so you're going to hit some nip. I want to say also, make sure to follow Tom on Twitch and watch his many fine Twitch streams.

Oh, thank you. Oh, make sure to buy Tom's girlfriend. Girlfriend does find it. That's right. And you'll frequently find myself and Devon there in chat sort of trying to shock him off of various platforms where he plays Lost Egg or get him to crash his car in American Truck Simulator.

Yeah, I play a bunch of bullshit games. Yes, that's right. But it's fun. So do do that. And don't forget, we have a Patreon five bucks a month. You get a second episode every week. So that is a pretty good investment if you want to spend money to... It can only go up in value.

Exactly. If you want, if it is worth about as much as lemonade. Yeah, you can buy an NFT. Saying I'm your girlfriend. Yeah, all the bonus episodes are actually generated by an AI. We have no involvement in them whatsoever. It's a deep fake. Anyway, this year, this week, this year, this week,

we are doing the second installment and also this year of our years and years watch series called Weeks and Weeks. Called Weeks and Weeks. That's right. So do stick around for that. Anyway, we will see you in a few days in the bonus later. Bye-bye.

Bye.